Scientific Linux stops development – To switch to CentOS

Today, whether it be sombre or otherwise, the FOSS Community says goodbye to one of their many Linux distributions that serve the world through hard work and dedication. Scientific Linux, based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and co-developed by Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), is being discontinued.

The distribution was developed for the sole purpose of providing a reliable Linux distro to be used by scientific computing purposes. Their main user base was within the High Energy and High-Intensity Physics community. From their site, the goals of the distribution were to:

Provide a stable, scalable, and extensible operating system for scientific computing

Support scientific research by providing methods and procedures for enabling the integration of scientific applications with the operating environment

Use the free exchange of ideas, designs, and implementations to prepare a computing platform for the next generation of scientific computing. (www.scientificlinux.org, 2019).

Scientific Linux support will not experience an immediate shutdown though, current versions (6 and 7) will have support for a while without any future endeavors to release version 8. Instead, CentOS 8, the community edition of Red Hat Linux will replace what would be Scientific Linux 8.

Quoting Amundson, “We will collaborate with CERN and other labs to help make CentOS an even better platform for high-energy physics computing. Fermilab will continue to support Scientific Linux 6 and 7 through the remainder of their respective lifecycles. Thank you to all who have contributed to Scientific Linux and who continue to do so.”

So there it is, Scientific Linux has finally decided to deploy CentOS 8 for their future goals while working closely with the Community to make it even better. While it may seem sombre, it makes more sense to collaborate with them because either way, Scientific Linux was based on RHEL.

The power of technology can be blatantly perceived by everyone in the world today and its sway did not spare me. John is a tech enthusiast, ComputingforGeeks writer and an ardent lover of knowledge and new skills that make the world brighter. His interests lie in Storage systems, High Availability, Routing and Switching, Automation, Monitoring, Android and Arts.